David Cole

www.decole.com

Published Books

I started writing at seven, although what I wrote at that age remains a guess and was probably an imitation of some popular radio show . . . the shadow knows. In the past half century, beginning with patent applications and continuing through missile launch procedures and computer usage aids, my last regularly salaried job as a production editor saw me putting out manuals for machines that made cardboard boxes. Is fiction any stranger than that?

My fiction writing has always been politically motivated. Quite frankly, I chose the mystery format because it was a good-selling market, and I could wrap my politics around the plot. And in a very real sense, mysteries are one of the last remaining genres where morality plays a central role. I want "good" to triumph.

Laura Winslow, my central character, is a half-Hopi, one-time-Ritalin-abuser computer hacker, living on the run while battling the demons behind her own anxiety disorder. My first book, Butterfly Lost, is a semi- to medium-hard-boiled mystery. Laura inhabits social, psychological, and geographic borderlands, and continually tries to solve the ambiguities of Native/non-Native identity, the ties and terrors of personal commitments, and the backstreet life of the US/Mexican border region. Later books in the series are less-boiled (how did "boiled" ever begin as a mystery genre?). Now in love, Laura is far more socially interactive and she's also reunited with her daughter. But that doesn't mean my major characters' lives aren't works-in-progress.

This sounds kinda serious and dark. Hey, I have fun writing these books (or "entertainments" as Graham Greene once said). And Laura has mellowed considerably over the last three books. But I also want to write of truths in the lives of Native Americans and undocumented workers crossing over the US/Mexico border. (I'm also nowhere near as serious/somber as my picture above. New York fashion photographer Robert Carroll asked me to pose deadpan, like "a too-old PI with Colt .45 eyes.")

My youthful isolation in Michigan's Upper Peninsula tends to push me towards creating characters who are outsiders, caught between enjoying their small town lives and wanting to be somewhere else. This inevitably colors my writing, so that bright moments are set against a darker side. Few boys I knew in high school liked the emotional complexities of movies or literature or classical music, so I grew up with girls, and in later years, women, as my best friends. This has always influenced my preference for women as strong central characters.

The world is both a delight and a dark place. At the end of a good mystery, I want a light to shine.